Welcome to the Media and Games Invest Q1 Presentation 2024. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO Remco Westermann and CFO Paul Echt. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I would like to welcome all our investors, analysts, and other stakeholders to our report of the Q1 2024, and we would like to guide you through the achievements of this quarter. Paul will do the financial part, our CFO, and I will do the more general part. Starting with this slide, first slide, yeah, we had a very strong first quarter. We indicated that already earlier when we got out some quarterly numbers and indications. After 2023 and also end of 2022, which were difficult periods for advertising, where we really saw that people were bringing down their advertising budgets, we had already a good Q4 last year and an even better now Q1 2024. We had 21% organic growth, so really happy with that.
Yeah, company is growing again, and this was organic growth, so that's really nice to see that happening in the market again, where part of it was market recovery, but a big part also was really onboarding new customers. We'll get to some details later on that. Then another big achievement in Q1 was the partnership with Google Cloud and the AI partnership with Google, which I'll also further elaborate into. Then, yeah, privacy, a lot of things happening on the privacy side, so our privacy focus very strong, also helping us to grow our revenues. ATOM 3.0 release, I'll cover that also later in the presentation, and strong and increasing industry recognition. I think that's a very important point.
We haven't had it so much in before, but being in ad tech, big part, of course, of our growth is that people recognize that we are a good and strong party in this market. I think that's happening more and more, and we'll have some more details on that later in the presentation. Today also time, like we always do with our Q1 report for the guidance for 2024. Here to say we are really happy to guide for nice organic growth with up to EUR 48 million. Also a few words of care here. We are still in a world with a lot of geopolitical things happening or potentially happening, so we are guiding very carefully. Last year we had to bring our guidance down. I hope that we, or I, let's say, wouldn't like to do that this year again.
So in that sense, we're guiding carefully, but as you see, Q1 is really nice, and there is more possible, but let's really look into a nice year with good organic growth, but with even more possible. Going to the next slide o ur KPIs y eah, KPIs is that what drives our growth, our organic revenue growth, but also our EBITDA growth. Ad impressions went up very nicely, 199 billion in Q1 2024 versus 166 billion in Q1 2023, which is a 20% increase. Then our net dollar expansion rate. That's what the customers, the old customers that were there a year before in the same quarter, comparing the revenue that they did that quarter with the current revenue. Yeah, here very positive news. Our old customers are growing again. And we had four quarters, as you see here, where the old customer base spent less.
And this is here where we really now see market recovery, companies getting back to spend, companies increasing their budgets again, and also shifting more spend towards us. So 10% growth versus a year ago, very nice organic growth with the existing customer base. We did more, and that comes from new customers. And that's what you see in the bottom of the slide. We have the over $100,000 software clients. Those are the ones that really bring substance, that are big. We are changing our reporting here a bit, but we want to be fully open on that and also show you what we are changing. So so far we have always been reporting the supply side partners that did over $100,000 as being strongly strongest on the supply side.
But we have also communicated that we want to get more towards the demand side, so closer to the advertisers, directly selling to advertisers and agencies. And that's what you see on the right side, which we have now included. So here we see, and that's really good to see that effect also, that we are stronger growing at the moment on the demand side. So we have good growth on the supply side, which is our strong base, but we also show really nice growth on the demand side. So overall, our software clients with over $100,000 have grown to 600,000, sorry from 612,000 to 764,000, a 30% growth. So happy with those underlying KPIs. Then going to the next slide. Yeah, strategic cooperation with Google Cloud.
We had a press release out on that, but some of the highlights here, it's going to lead to a lot of cost savings over the next four years. What we are doing is bringing all our cloud activities into the Google Cloud. So far we were working with multiple cloud providers. That's less efficient because we need teams for different clouds. You don't get the same conditions, of course. And we have agreed with Google that we will really shift to Google. They will also support us on the shift. And on top of that, we will really see some really nice savings in the coming years because of the shift, already expecting first savings of that this year.
Then the second point is really, and that's maybe even more important because that's helping us on the revenue side or indirectly helping us on the revenue side, we will get access to the AI capabilities of Google. And that will help us also to further optimize our algorithms, our AI routines, which will further improve the way we target and also give us a better position towards publishers and advertisers just by doing better results. So super happy with this. Then going to the next slide. Yeah, Atom 3.0 release. You know we have been talking about Atom a lot. In hindsight, maybe we started talking a bit too early about it because it really took longer than we all expected. Much more technically complex product. Also, let's say, to really get it ready for scale took time. But yeah, it's there now.
In a world where privacy is changing, where identifiers are going away, Atom really gives us the possibility to target on-device, work also with AI on-device, so we optimize on-device. Yeah, we started in 2021, as you see here, and it's now, let's say, after a lot of testing, after a lot of optimization also, and the 3.0 already shows that it's not the first version, we have been able to really now release the version. It's integrated in our HyBid SDK, which is one of the two SDKs that we have. And yeah, with that, it reaches over 10,000 apps, over 1.5 billion users. And it's good to be contextual, but it's even better to be contextual at scale.
And that's what we are with it, whereby it's not, let's say, it's an, I would say, it's a middle thing between contextual and targeting, but it's securing that no privacy data leaves the device. It's yeah, just the way and also if you talk to regulators, the future way of doing advertising is on-device, targeting on-device, leaving the data on the device. And that's exactly what we're doing here. The market is also there for it. If you look at iOS, then 75% of the users at the moment avoid tracking. So they say, no, I don't want to be tracked. And therefore, this is really something that will, in a market where also CPMs have been suffering, because if you can't identify who you're targeting, it's just less value for the ad.
But with this tool, with our Atom 3.0 we are able to give, in a blind world, the possibility to target. And that's, of course, making also our partners happy. And you see also, sorry, you see a quote here from Liftoff, one of our partners. But also AdExchanger is really showing that they think we are on a good road here. So that's Atom 3.0 release. Going to the next slide. Yeah, then I mentioned already before when I started, very important for us that we are not, yeah, working on good products and nobody is seeing that, but that really we, as Verve Group, which is the brand that we work with in the advertising side, is getting recognition. And recognition are those like AdExchanger, which is saying that we are one of the top players. Same with Pixalate.
Then we have also on the contextual side, Digiday and TPA are really, yeah, giving us rewards for this contextual part. That's super, of course, in a market where there's a lot of uncertainty because of identifiers going away. Then we have Jounce Media, which is also giving us the, yeah, the benefit for being one of the strongest players on the direct supply side, which in a market where people are cutting players or intermediaries is, of course, also good. And also happy with Singular. And that's going on the next page, where yeah, SKAN is the tool that Apple makes available for targeting in their way. So it's not fully blind. They have taken the IDFA out, but they are still giving signals. And also that's another world, which is important, so the part where Apple gives at least partial signals.
That's also where we have a strong position and where we're really, yeah, showing that we're doing well. And I think that's important to say in a world with privacy, where privacy is strong, you see different ways of targeting. I mean, everybody still wants to target. And you need to be much more diverse as a company. You need to be able to do contextual targeting. You need to be able to use Scan. You need to use all kinds of different ways of targeting. And I think that's where we really have shown in the past already and are further investing in. Yeah, it's a very important part for us. Then going to the next part, and that's the financials, handing over to Paul.
Thank you, Remco. So starting here with the financial highlights of the first quarter. And as Remco emphasized earlier on already, we showed a double-digit revenue growth. So 20% total revenue growth, whereof 21% were organic. It's also good to see now that the organic revenue growth is very close to the total revenue growth, which means all the divestments and closures, which we kicked off in 2022 to streamline the company and also as part of the transformation towards a media company, is fully done now. So we're looking at a very clean, streamlined business and can also further grow from here. And we were able to print EUR 82 million in revenues with a very strong EBITDA of EUR 22 million, which relates to 16% EBITDA growth and the 10% EBIT growth.
We also capitalized 3% of net revenues less compared to the previous year where we capitalized 11%. Now we are at 8%, which means basically 3% less EBITDA. But in the end, this is still adding to free cash flow. And therefore, we have become here more conservative on that side. Otherwise, the EBITDA growth would have been even stronger. Strong margin as well. So 27% EBITDA margin, 20% EBIT margin, both as well within our range and even a bit on the upper side of our midterm financial targets. And what is really outstanding is also the very strong cash flow generation with EUR 24 million operating cash flow before change in working capital and EUR 12 million investing cash flow. So overall, highly profitable and very good cash generation. Then coming to the more long-term view.
Here we see that we are able to really further scale revenues by achieving our EUR 363 million in revenues, EUR 98 million EBITDA, EUR 78 million EBIT, 29% EBITDA margin, which is at the upper end of our target of 25%-30%. What is really outstanding is that after three years of declining organic growth due to the current geopolitical climate, we are able to show very meaningful double-digit organic growth again. We are also very confident that we can show this strong growth throughout the coming quarters and periods and therefore looking forward also to the coming nine months. That brings us to the operating cash flow and CapEx development.
Here we see that we have been able to further grow our operating cash flow on an LTM basis from EUR 69 million to EUR 87 million, while the interest just increased slightly from EUR 39 million to EUR 41 million.
Overall, we're scaling cash flows much faster than the slight increase, which we still see on the interest side. We also expect that the interest has seen a peak now. There's also a positive outlook based on Bloomberg and other portals that interest rate cuts might be possible in the coming periods. That would obviously further help also the cash flow generation. On the CapEx side, we are stable after we actually reduced our expansion CapEx over the last three years significantly. It's important also to invest into further organic growth, which is clear, which is a clear part of our agenda for the coming periods to further build on our market-leading position.
But in a nutshell, we have generated very strong operating cash flows driven by the strong organic growth and also have a very sound working capital management and therefore showing a very strong increase in operating cash flow on an LTM basis. That brings us to the leverage ratio. Here we are on an adjusted basis being on 3.2. The reason that it's increased on an LTM basis is basically that we had EUR 15 million seasonal working capital swings, which will balance out until the end of the year and become positive. In addition, we also decided due to the very strong financial performance of the company, instead of paying earnouts in shares, to pay them in cash. That has led to the slight increase o n a normalized adjusted base we would be below 3 times.
So taking out the one-time working capital effect and the earnout payment, that said, until the end of the year, we're very confident that also on the reported level, we will be well below three again. And another important information also here on the right side is that we have significantly reduced our earnouts on the balance sheet, having now EUR 27 million as of end of Q1 with EUR 12 million payable in shares or in cash at our sole discretion in 2025. So therefore, there is also no balance sheet risk from any future earnout payments at the MGI balance sheet.
That brings us now to the guidance for 2024. And as Remco mentioned earlier, we have been very prudent on this, guiding on EUR 350 -EUR 370 million revenues, EUR 100 million-EUR 110 million EBITDA. I think it's still a very solid organic increase, and there is no MA planned.
But at the same point in time, given the current geopolitical climate, we rather want to under promise and overdeliver. But that said, there's definitely further upside also to the guidance coming from the very strong customer growth, which we see and which is further also going into the second quarter. There's also upside from increasing CPMs in the future. Definitely additional political dollars from the US elections, which makes 70% of our revenues in the US. That's another growth driver. And then also potential interest rate cuts in the US, but also in Europe, will free up more advertising budgets from advertisers and obviously also reduce the interest expenses for the MGI Group. So overall, a very strong outlook. But again, we rather underpromise and overdeliver here. And that's why we guide on EUR 350 million-EUR 370 million revenues and EUR 100 million-EUR 110 million EBITDA.
With that said, over to Remco for some closing remarks.
Yes, thank you very much, Paul. Yeah, I think altogether, we're building a great company here, which we have shown in the past. But looking forward, I think there's a lot to come. We continue to build a company when the budgets were lower, when everybody was negative. I think it's good that we continue to invest then, even though we also, of course, looked at our operational efficiencies where we did the cost reductions and the things that you know. But we're now really showing in our revenues and EBITDA that, yeah, we are really nicely coming back. But even more important, I think, is to emphasize our strong position in AI, data, and targeting, which are strongly correlated or strongly related to each other. I think that's where we really have been investing and which will also drive future growth. So about the guidance, Paul said it already.
It's a careful guidance. Looking at Q1, I mean, there might be much more possible, but we are in a dynamic world. There is, let's say, substantial potential downsides with all the geopolitical things that are happening in this world. So that's where we're careful or the reason that we're careful. There's also, as Paul already said, a lot of upsides, the market recovery, budgets coming back, but also expecting that CPMs will be bouncing back towards the second half of the year. Then customer growth, a lot of new customers, especially because of our strong position in contextual, growing the supply and the demand sides. Supply was always where we were very strong. And we said, let's say, let's also build a stronger demand side, which we are really working on. And you saw that on the customers.
And yeah, we will have some special effects like elections, but also Olympics, football championships, and the likes, which will really help us. So our mission is make media better. And yeah, we want to profitably grow the company revenue-wise, EBITDA-wise, and bring it forward. So thank you very much for tuning in. And I would hand over to the analysts or let's say to the moderator first. Thank you very much.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Jörg Frey from Warburg Research. Please go ahead.
Hello guys. It's Philip. Well, nice to see your figures. A couple of questions from my side. I do it one-on-one if it's okay for you. Probably starting firstly with you mentioned ad impression growth of basically close to net revenue growth. And if I'm not mistaken, CPMs are still somewhat negative. Does this indicate that you are now in a position to more or less get some premium pricing, or can you shed some more light off the driver of this development and potentially also your CPM outlook?
Yeah, I can take this one. Thank you first for the question, Philip. CPMs are a very difficult topic because it has a lot of, let's say, complexity behind it. What we overall see is that CPMs in the market are not yet bouncing back. When there's less spent, I mean, we have an auctioning system where ads are auctioned. And it's like with the stock exchange where there's less demand, prices go down. When there's more demand, prices go up. We are still in quarters that are the lower revenue quarters. I mean, the quarters get stronger during the year. And even though we see recovery also with our customers, we don't see so much recovery that the CPMs are really bouncing back or going up substantially. That's, let's say, overall generally in the market.
If you then look into more detail, CPMs for traffic where there is no identifier are by definition lower. However, sorry, if you then, let's say, are able to put targeting on it like we do now with Atom, for example, you can achieve a higher CPM than markets, even though it can be a lower average CPM than it's lower CPM than the average CPM in the market. So it's a super complex topic. But what we do with the targeting, with better targeting, is indeed versus the market getting better CPMs. However, overall market recovery, we don't see. And we have the effect that we do a lot of targeting on non-identified traffic where the CPMs, even if we increase them with better targeting, are still lower than the ones with targeting. So I hope that answers your question.
Yeah, yeah, yes. Very helpful, indeed. Probably the next bit complicated question. What I really saw with delight that you got some traction also in CTV rankings. Just wondering a bit how you manage that. Assume targeting or is well, it's much more difficult in CTV to differentiate via targeting, or have you found anything which you can do on CTVs in, well, to target household members or anything like that?
Yeah, yeah, thank you, Philip. In CTV, it was, let's say, the first important thing was to build up enough reach. We're reaching over 60% of the households now in the U.S. with CTV, which is really getting connected and getting contracts with enough supply that you are able to reach, how to say, the target group that you want to reach. And then your question is exactly aiming in the right direction. It's about targeting and data. And that's a very nice thing that you can use data over different channels and that the data strength that we have built for in-app, because that's where we basically have our strongest position, that we also can use that on the CTV side. So in that sense, yeah, you need to differentiate yourself. You need to be better at targeting than others.
And that's actually the reason that people are moving from traditional TV to, how to say, from linear TV, traditional TV, to CTV, connected TV, is that you can target people. And with our data, we are also very nicely positioned there. So we try to, and I think that we had that in the last quarter's presentation, we try to steer away from just mass marketing CTV because that has very low margins, but really more into the value-add part where we have, how to say, where we can help with our data.
Thanks a lot. And last question from my side, really. Is there anything you can point out in your own gaming segment, any launches or anything going on?
Yeah, we have regular changes, updates in the games. So we did a bit more than a year ago, we optimized the portfolio. So we took smaller games out. The games that we have now, which are Fiesta or Trove or Wizard101, for example, they all have regular game updates. It's really gaming as a service with, on a regular basis, yeah, bringing in new worlds or new features, new characters, those things. So that's more, I would say, launches as usual, even though some are a bit bigger than others. On the casual PC portfolio of games, we're still launching a lot of, or furthermore, launching a lot of new games. So that's third-party games where we have licenses, which are launched on a regular basis.
I think the, let's say, the biggest thing that we're seeing now in our game portfolio is on Extreme Car Driving Simulator, the game from AxesInMotion, our biggest mobile game that we have, that they are now implementing multiplayer features. They have started with that. Looking at the roadmap, it's also not one big release or so, but there's a lot of things coming there. So it's all in our existing games portfolio. New game launches, as you know, we are a bit afraid of that and said, "Okay, let's rather concentrate on growing the ad tech side." But let's say the games that we have are solid games where we really invest further in and that are really showing very nice, yeah, addition to what we have.
Don't forget, it's not about, let's say, not only about the games themselves making money, but especially also the value adds they have for the advertising side, which is the data and which is also giving us a testing environment for things like Atom to really be faster in testing.
Sounds good. Well, all the best for the next couple of quarters. Hope we realize some more of this positive momentum.
Thank you very much, Philip.
The next question comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin. Please go ahead.
Hey guys. Congrats on the good start to the year. Just 2 topics on my side I'd like to discuss with you. I'll ask my 2 questions together. 1, it seemed to me, maybe I'm just imagining it, but there was maybe a bit more discussion about M&A possibilities on the last earnings call. Maybe you can share what is going on with there, with multiples, if anything is still interesting, how you're assessing that situation. And then the second topic would be just maybe a bit more clarity on the guided range, what scenarios are behind the 2 ends of the range that you're guiding for this year?
Yeah, I can take the first one. Paul, if you take the second one. Talking about M&A, we didn't talk about M&A today, which doesn't say that we are not further looking into M&A. We have been growing this company, yeah, substantially also via M&A. We're here because we did really some very nice acquisitions, which built the basis of where we are today. With what we have today, we don't need to do acquisitions. I think I also emphasized that already earlier. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a perfect company. And so also on our side, there are still parts of the business where sometimes an M&A might be able to help us to grow faster. So that's the reason that we're further looking into M&A.
M&A, we haven't done any M&A for the last more than 1.5 years because the, yeah, the valuation targets but price expectations were too high. The other thing is also company internally, we have, let's say, substantial leverage at the moment where we also want to bring that down and not to increase it by further doing too much M&A. It's about balancing between those. Let's say if, yeah, we don't want to do any transaction, which is not really a super accretive transaction. That makes us more picky. On the other hand, as said, the market still had some expectations, which were more from the times when the capital was cheaper and let's say it made more sense to pay those kind of multiples. We see those multiples coming down.
Yeah, and I'm not ruling out that there might be some M&A in the future. But at the moment, yeah, nothing concrete to say on that side.
And then, yeah, I would comment on the guidance. So yeah, we have been very prudent on it and rather want to under promise and overdeliver, especially as currently still the geopolitical climate is quite volatile, I would say, which could have also certain impacts. And yeah, we think it's very reasonable currently to be trading rather in regards to the upper end of the guidance. And as also indicated on the last slide of the presentation, there is a lot of things and upsides in the coming periods and quarters. And therefore, we are very confident also to show very good results. That said, what was basically last year that there was that we need to reduce it, something similar we definitely wanted to avoid. And therefore, yeah, rather under promise and over deliver. That's the clear target of this guidance.
Paul, how sensitive would you say that the guidance is to the actions of the Federal Reserve in the coming months?
We have not factored in interest rate cuts. So that would definitely be another upside towards our revenue, EBITDA performance given that it would free up additional advertising budgets from our customers where we are growing the base very strongly as we saw now in Q1, but also in previous quarters. So that could increase our Net Dollar Expansion Rate quite nicely. So this came from existing customers. But also there, I think over the last couple of weeks and months, there were so many interest rate cuts expected. And then it was always revised and revised. And in the end, we will see much less now, at least that's, as of today, the expectation. So therefore, we were rather careful here. While we definitely see a very nice upside from that.
Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Ellis.
The next question comes from Sebastian Patulea from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. I've got three questions, please. First one, what's driving the excellent increase by 30% of new customers, please? Is it investment in tech? Is it better ROIs? Is it investment in the sales force? What's bringing those customers to MGI, please? And I'll ask them one by one.
Perfect. Yeah, great question, Sebastian. What's behind the, let's say, the growth? As said before, let's differentiate now from existing customers because also existing customers are growing. There we have similar things. I mean, the one is, let's say, expanding budgets, but also convincing them to do more with us. That's, let's say, also one of the reasons of getting new customers in because the customers we show are the over $100,000 customers. I mean, to onboard a customer is sales to really make sure that you get the connection, that they start working with you. But then after selling it to a customer, it's about really performing and showing that you do good work for them.
So on the sales side, the things like contextual and those arguments and being strong in the market, all the industry, let's say, articles and all the things we get are really helping us a lot. But then after that, we have to prove that we are doing a better that we're delivering, sorry, better results than other people they are working with. And then it comes really to AI, to data, to targeting. And it's exactly the combination of the three of them. The advertiser wants to really get the best results and target the target group that, yeah, is needed for his product or for his services. And the publisher, in the end, is the one that we work very closely together with to make that to enable that. So yeah, I hope that answers your question.
Maybe to just add. So what we definitely also did over the last 2 and 3 years is having a lot of learnings on the media side because we started as a gaming company. So we have not just hired more sales talent and people. We have also obviously had a lot of learning effects over the last years. And therefore, our sales teams on the demand, but also on the supply side, basically, it's a well-oiled machine now. Even we potentially will add more on the workforce as we think we can still grow much faster. But also the transformation from a games company towards a media company and further optimizing that in combination with an extremely strong product offering on the contextual non-IDFA side is a big help.
I think also things like what Remco just emphasized on in the presentation, that we are now the number one or Dataseat is the number one in terms of the adoption rate for Scan 4.0. All these kind of things together, obviously, also bring us a lot of inbound. And then, yeah, having also a much stronger SDK these days, which is rather plug-and-play, so we can implement customers much, much faster than two or three years ago where it was much more manual effort and took much longer to implement the SDK. That's really plug-and-play now. So there's a lot of great things coming together, which we can leverage currently and also will be able to leverage in the coming periods.
Thank you for that. Regarding the 110% Net Dollar Expansion Rate, may I please ask, is this in line with the market as corporations are increasing ad spend? Is it better than the market? Are you cross-selling more? Can you do that? And also, can it also be a factor of longer duration contracts from advertisers? And how do you book them? Do you book them upfront or how does that work?
Could I take a run or?
Yeah, you can start and then I'll come fill in. Please go.
So I haven't seen the most recent one from our peers. But in general, over other periods, we get stronger net dollar expansion rates than the majority of our peers. But also that said, we were still a bit of a smaller player compared to some others. So we could take more share of wallet and these kind of things, which is obviously a big help in regards to increasing also budgets with existing customers. And yeah, I think that really drives it. But also then offering new solutions to them is definitely a bigger part. So upselling, cross-selling, new products, and increasing it.
Yeah, and maybe to add on it because you asked about the contracts. We have long-term contracts, but we don't have volume commitments in the contracts. That's not typical for the supply side. If you're working on the programmatic side, let's say you don't book the volumes in advance. You buy the volumes when they are there. That's also the reason that we want to go more towards the demand side where those kind of contracts are more usual and where you get committed budgets for the coming quarter and where you also have done more visibility, of course, on your revenues. So supply side, no such things. On the demand side, we have some. And that's, yeah, we're steering towards that.
But we will always keep a big part, which is just depending on, yeah, how much the budgets are that are allocated and how much wins there are related to that. So winning auctions, I mean. I hope that answers your question, Sebastian.
Yes, it does. Thank you very much for that. May I also ask regarding the guidance? So at the midpoint, you're forecasting EUR 38 million in organic growth at the midpoint of the guidance. What percentage of that would you say is contracted as of today? And how much of the remaining is as aspirations? I'm just trying to assess what's in the guidance, please, and how much are aspirations?
Yeah, also here, we don't have guaranteed. Thanks for the question, sorry. We don't have guaranteed committed budgets. But what we, of course, see is that there is, let's say, it's big numbers. And big numbers also show, how do you say it, reliability in the forecasting. So when we see that really budgets are shifted towards us, when we see that new customers are onboarded that are really doing substantial spend on us, you can predict from that, of course, future revenues. But as said, if there is a big geopolitical crisis or something, those budgets can go away pretty fast as well as we have seen and not only us, but all sectors have seen in end 2022 and early 2023. So there is no committed revenue. So there's no guarantee on this. There are, however, as Paul also described before, substantial upsides still to this.
But there is also looking at geopolitical things, we are a bit careful on that. I hope that answers the question.
One thing maybe to point out, and we didn't report on this quarter because we had this change of definitions, etc. But what we and we will report in the future again, it's a retention rate. So if you look at, for example, into our Q4 presentation, and we started reporting already in Q4 2021. And there you see that we have always traded in a customer retention rate between 95%-97% each quarter. So even we don't have these kind of long-term contracts with guaranteed volumes. The customers stay on the platform. And in okay-ish or good times, they also further scale. So we are also growing the customers, which is in the end about delivering quality.
I think the strong retention rate also gives a good confidence that we basically don't have long-term contracts, keep the customers on board, and then scale them over time.
Thank you very much. Maybe if I can squeeze one last one, a short one, please. At the midpoint of the guidance, you're estimating EUR 38 million of revenue incrementally and also only EUR 10 million of EBITDA. That's around 26%, adjusted EBITDA margin. May I please ask why is it only that? Are you just trying to be conservative at the midpoint of the guidance? Why aren't there further advantages of scale, please?
So I can take it first, and then Remco, you can maybe just add. So on the EBITDA margin, we capitalize 3%-4% less year-over-year. So that would basically close the gap, which you might currently see. But that's obviously still adding to free cash flow. So therefore, that's on this. And in regards to the mid-term guidance, yes, it's rather conservative and prudent. But we definitely want to under promise and overdeliver. I think that's a very clear. That's our very clear answer to this. Even we also think we can do more. And what we have seen in Q1 is also further holding. So therefore, there is no signs that the coming nine months will be not very strong. Let's say what we have experienced last year, we definitely want to avoid. And the geopolitical climate is still quite volatile.
Also the expectation for interest rate cuts have been revised now so many times that we really want to be very prudent on it and rather surprise positively in the coming periods.
Yeah, I think I can only fill in on that. We are careful on the EBITDA side because of, let's say, a lot of things externally in the market, not to predict. However, there's also an internal thing. We want to further invest. I think that's also a signal we want to give. We want to further invest in this company. And we will be investing especially on the sales side. That question came also before. We are adding a lot of salespeople at the moment. We have great products. We need to sell them. We need to onboard new customers. And the salespeople go against the EBITDA, of course. So in that sense, also there we are careful. It should yield extra, extra revenues. But let's say you're certain on the cost side, not so certain on the revenue side.
Also, that's another reason to be a bit more careful on the EBITDA than even on the revenue side.
Thank you very, very much.
The next question comes from Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison Group. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for the presentation. My first question was again about the staffing up because we had talked about that before, particularly on the demand side, the need to have the right people in place to talk to the people that you want to talk to. Do you now have that full team in situ? And if not, do we look for an acceleration of the additional demand side clients coming through? And my second question, I'll do the both at once, is on the contextual. And before we've talked about being in the door-knocking phase, do you feel that the market is still sort of researched and being careful, or do you think they're actually hitting the go button now? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Fiona. Good questions. Yeah, staffing up is never final. So let's say we staffed up quite a few already. We are further looking for good people. The good thing is that the market is really more relaxed, but to really find good sellers takes time. And yeah, we see good referral results, but we still have open, yeah, I still have vacancies there. So still further looking for good people there. And not only in the U.S. I mean, U.S. is our main market, but we're also looking at geo expansion. I think that's an important thing to mention. We are very strong in the U.S.
We have a decent position in certain European companies, countries, sorry, not companies, and also in some Latin markets, a little bit in Asia, but also there we have still ample potential to further scale up our, yeah, how to say it, sales side. Then to your contextual question, yeah, it's interesting to watch. People were very hesitant. I think we've described that before about going into contextual. Everybody, yeah, heard there's something happening, but also everybody had the feeling like, okay, it will last and there's no urgency to, how do you say, to act. Then Apple came with its IDFA changes, its SKAN changes. That made people aware, but there were still many, I would say, customers that or parties in the market that shifted their budgets to Google where, let's say, the identifier was still there.
Then Google announced in Q4 that they really would start deprecating their cookie, which they also started in Q1. And there we saw really a lot of awareness of companies, oh, we have to do something. Now, Google came out a week ago with that they will delay the implementation of their, let's say, cookie deprecation towards 2025. So that's giving a bit of relief in the customer side. It's also taking some of the pressure off. But I think that the shock or, let's say, the, how do you say, awareness that something has to happen with customers is there. And there's a lot of criticism on the, how to say, the Google Sandbox implementation, which is, yeah, pretty strong gearing towards Google. So I think it's good that it's postponed, that it's optimized or changed.
But the awareness with the customer that they need to be ready for contextual or to be ready for a world without identifiers is there. And that should really further help us in, yeah, gaining market position.
You would imagine that the larger benefit from that would now be 25, would you?
Yeah, I think it's about the awareness of really that they have to do something to start testing because you also don't scale up those customers from one day to the other. So basically, it's good. The panic is a bit out of the market, but the awareness that they have to go contextual is there. It might be that budgets are shifting a bit slower, but even there, I'm not so afraid because we show indeed with contextual or, let's say, also with tools like Atom that you can reach even better targeting results than with the traditional way of cookies because cookies is also not that ideal. So for us, the positive thing is that the awareness is there that something has to happen, that really marketing managers are starting to look much more into contextual.
That gives us the opportunity to prove that we do really good results with that. That would really scale up the business.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Yeah, I would like to thank everybody for tuning in. I would especially like to thank the analysts for their questions and, yeah, being involved with us as a company. I think we gave a yeah, very nice view into the future. This company can do a lot more. Yeah, we are back to growth and we'll start to do everything to continue that. Thank you very much. Yeah, we talk soon.